Lonely

I’ve been using my 3-year-old gmail account more and more for things lately. I created it back when gmail was still in invite-only mode because I could, but I’ve never had much use for it because I’ve preferred to have my mail stored locally in an email client that didn’t necessitate that I keep a gmail tab open in my browser. But I’ve been more and more irritated by spam lately and have even thought about changing my email address. Problem is, my personal email address is old enough that it’s attached to accounts and lists I can’t even remember that I might still need to get info from. I had noticed that spam control on my old gmail account seemed to be pretty good. So this weekend, I looked into hosted gmail for my domain. It was actually very easy to set up. Within a half hour of starting my investigation, I started getting mail at my own personal instance (for all practical purposes) of gmail. And I’ve been lonely ever since. Only one or two spams have actually gotten to my inbox (and some 500 were successfully blocked in the past day), and this paucity of spam has actually helped me to garden a few other emails I get but am not interested in. I’ve just continued to delete them along with spam for however many years, but now that I get no spam, I’m finding it easy to weed out these other annoying messages (e.g. from lists I no longer care about). The result, of course, is that now I’m lonely. My old email client (Thunderbird) caught mucho spam, but mucho still got stuck in my box, so there was always something of a clatter simulated by the clutter. Now that’s gone, and I’m rattling around in my own inbox, listening for the whisper of footsteps, peeping out the front window for visitors.